Are we putting too much faith in the cloud | Hacker News Reader

Are we putting too much faith in the cloud

millwoodonline.co.uk

9 pointstimmillwood6 comments

My technique is to keep local copies and encrypted copies of important data in the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc). This preserves a bit of privacy (although probably quite vulnerable to brute force) and gives me off-site backups.

I would never assume that my data in the cloud is safe from being lost. It merely provides redundancy for me.

there is famous russian saying which literally translates to something like "saving of drowning people is responsibility of drowning people"

not many people realize that once information leaves your device there's not much they can do to secure it

transport level security is only as good as your faith in the whole idea of certificate authority

storage level security is only as good as security of entity you decided will be storing that data for you(the bigger, the more popular they are - and more sophisticated attacks are directed at them)

the only level that depends on drowning people is data security itself. encrypt all the things good enough and you can print it in newspapers without ever worrying it will be cracked in foreseeable future.

regarding services are down or closed - it's a risk you have to live with just as a risk of having your device stolen from you or just fucked up

the only solution to all these problems imo is global decentralized data exchange and storage protocol with proper public/private security implementation that other applications build their services on top of

Yes, but we have to put our faith in something.

Well put. The cloud is, for many many things, the best option for both businesses and consumers. It attempts to commoditize difficult and mundane tasks such as provisioning new servers or personal backups. The cloud offers the hope that both can be done better than everyone doing it themselves.

Nothing is keeping you from selecting a cloud service that offers more security or having backups or fallback servers in your home or office. If that's important to you.

The cloud doesn't solve ALL your problems but it has a real chance to solve many of them.

I'd rather put my faith in someone else managing the hardware and IT overhead rather than in me doing it.

Setting up and maintaining a RAID backup solution at home, and actually using it is very hard.

Once nice thing about cloud services where users store data is that it's transparent that they're backing up local data. They're just using the service.

Wisdom: Never put all your eggs in one basket.

Ignorance: Let's just put everything in the cloud!

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